Voices: Daniel Harding, Magdalena Kožená, The Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia

They sang, they shouted, they whispered, they howled from beyond—from every corner, from above and below, from right and left. The music was equally diverse, from highly melodic to sheer cacophony. Castanets clicked, harps tickled, and the piano trembled.

It was Berio’s Sinfonia, whose centenary was celebrated at this year’s George Enescu International Festival in the best possible way: performed by the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, sung by London Voices, and conducted by Daniel Harding, who, oh yes, turned 50 on that very day.

                                    Photo by Petrica Tanse

Curiously, Harding seated the singers among the instrumentalists, dressed exactly like them, hard to spot. I counted four, although Berio wrote Sinfonia for eight voices (and orchestra). Yet it wasn’t eight voices—it was eight times eight. The result: an unreal acoustic effect. At times a rollicking waltz under rustling voices, at times a talkative singer sitting in the first viola’s spot distinctly pronounced: Mayakovsky. And then said, thank you, Mr Daniel Harding! (clearly not in the original score). A young woman in the first violin seat declaimed something in French. And so on, and so on.

Then, suddenly, one realized that a voice is not a sound. A voice is a shadow of breath, breaking free from within and seeking a body outside. We feel the vibration in our chest, but the voice itself detaches, eludes, lives in the air like a spirit leaving the flesh. It is the ghost of a body, and a ghost is always vulnerable. It can be distorted, recorded, slowed, sliced—but it cannot be held. A word once spoken is no longer mine; it is doomed to foreign ears, to another perception. Thus, the voice becomes less an extension of the body than its loss.

In music, the voice is especially ghostly: the singer, voicing someone else’s words, becomes a medium. Vibrations pass through the body that belong to no one personally. In this sense, the voice is a spirit, called forth into the world only to vanish immediately after its incarnation.

Twentieth-century philosophers also heard the phantasmic nature of the voice. Walter Benjamin spoke of the “aura” of a work of art—its unique presence, which disappears in reproduction. The voice has a similar aura: present and absent at the same time. It exists outside the body, and precisely this invisible distance makes it magical. Roland Barthes, in his essay The Grain of the Voice, spoke of the “bodily residue” in a voice—breath, texture, biological matter. Yet this residue is always paradoxical: we hear the body where there is none. The voice is flesh turned into sound, and thus no longer flesh.

Hmm, I seem to have wandered off.

                                 Photo by Petrica Tanse

The voices in Berio’s Sinfonia are a collage of epochs, a sudden museum of sounds, where the conductor becomes a guide through a labyrinth of memory. Here Mahler shakes Beckett’s hand, and Debussy teases a commercial jingle. It is not music in the conventional sense, but a gathering of voices disputing the right to call themselves history. Yet what music!

The first movement is sound archaeology: singers exhale, swallow words, push out syllables, turning language into an instrument. Harps whisper from behind the curtains of their own past; trumpets crumble the air. The second movement is a tombstone engraved with O Martin Luther King. The vocal O stretches as if the letter itself is trying to become a monument. Here the music resembles a newspaper article, or more precisely, an obituary, a black-and-white snapshot of protest. The third movement is the quintessence of postmodernism: Mahlerian storms from the Scherzo of the Second Symphony remind one of a noisy communal kitchen, where Beckett is read aloud, Joyce retold, and risotto recipes debated. Cries, whispers, “Keep going, going on…”—all intermingled, as if the score were a room in a house without walls. In these moments, the orchestra enacts the world’s unconscious: verbal flow and sonic chaos merge into a single organism.

                                       Photo by Petrica Tanse

In Daniel Harding’s interpretation, Berio’s Sinfonia sounded like a palindrome; it breathed with all voices at once and laughed at its own seriousness. An endless commentary on the very fact of art’s existence. One could also sense a molecularly decomposed Babylon, an alchemy of noise. Harding seemed to direct this chaos with deliberate coolness; his gestures were economical, restrained, sometimes nearly imperceptible. Yet it was precisely this coldness that created a space where orchestra and choir could indulge in madness. Perhaps the brilliant maestro decided to let Berio himself conduct his own ghost, making the music all the more eerie, all the more precise.

What lingered in the mind? The climax—the third movement. Mahlerian fabric torn into pieces and sewn back together with multicolored threads of foreign texts, in Harding’s hands became a polyphony of ghosts, a grand theater of voices where anything is possible. Flashes of Beethoven, Ravel, Stravinsky, Webern, Stockhausen, graffiti of past and present layered upon one another. Between them, voices speak, laugh, whisper, quote Beckett: “They play again… they sing again… they go again…”

Berio’s Sinfonia never truly ends—it layers, retreats into the wings, into listeners’ ears, into the infinite echo of its own quotations. In essence, Berio does with music what a city does with memory: layers voices so they no longer belong to individual bodies. In Sinfonia, the listener loses the sense of whose voice is whose, where quotation ends, where noise begins. Here the voice is no longer individuality but a stream, a collective ghost of culture. And yet the symphony remains corporeal. One hears singers’ breaths, intonations of laughter, cries, almost physiological human matter. It is a choir of bodies turned into phantoms—and phantoms suddenly made flesh. We, the audience, wander into this spectral space where voice and body are indistinguishable.

                                      Photo by Petrica Tanse

After the intermission, Magdalena Kožená sang and whispered, chattered and laughed. And cheerfully concluded: “honest words.” Again there was a Tower of Babel, a jumble of languages—Berio’s Folk Songs in their first version sounded, in various fading languages. The English song (melodically borrowing from American bard John Jacob Niles) tells of a country musician in love with a tousled blonde; the Armenian song of the moon; the playful French one, naturally, of flirtation; the Sicilian, of faithful fisherwives; the Genoese song dreams of La Donna Ideale; Sardinian, a nightingale instructs the lover in serenading; Occitan, of bachelors and married men, shepherds and shepherdesses, and so on. The cycle concludes in Azerbaijani, lovers arranging a midnight rendezvous—but Kožená, laughing, closed it with her own improvisation… in Russian. Honest words, indeed.

As for the Enescu Festival, there’s plenty more to tell—but that’s a story for another time.